Carolyn L. White’s research while affiliated with University of Nevada, Reno and other places

The contemporary city of Berlin is known for its art and for its community of practising artists, along with its ‘weirdness, perpetual incompleteness, and outlandishness . . . and the liveliness inherent in these qualities’ (Schneider 2014: 7). One of Berlin’s primary energy currents comes from the role of artists and the creative verve that abounds in the city. Artists use and reuse the physical environment of the post-Berlin Wall city and the surrounding environs (the Wall was officially taken down in 1989, although parts of it still remain) in temporary and permanent project spaces. The buildings and project spaces artists occupy are entwined with the history of the city— a history manifest in the city’s form, aesthetics, and economics. A similar dialectic exists inside artist spaces; artists actively define and redefine studio spaces through their practices as their manners and methods are simultaneously defined, confined, and reflective of the restrictions and allowances that interiors provide. This chapter is a contemporary archaeological analysis of the physical elements of four artists’ studios and buildings, the placement of artist communities within the city, and an exploration of the meanings of space and community in broader context. We highlight the reuse of historically significant buildings and the materiality and physicality of artists’ spaces within a broader context of the political economy of creativity. The use of Berlin for creative practice reflects many of the problems associated with the ‘Creative City’ and so-called creative economy. The art practices inside studios are reflective of the political economy of the world of art. The placement, availability, and tenuousness of the buildings themselves attest to problems associated with the adoption of creative capital by neoliberal capitalist agendas. The archaeological project can be used to document the micro and the macro—the interior and the exterior—of the economically circumscribed worlds of the artist, documenting an important moment in the development of a global cultural hotspot. The chapter considers project spaces as both physical places and conceptual spaces among Berlin artists focusing on the geographic, ephemeral, and enduring spaces of artist studios. What do project spaces in Berlin look like? How do individual artists create their spaces? How does the physical space reflect artistic practices?

Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of post-industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies. Over the past decade contemporary archaeology has emerged as a dynamic force for dissecting and contextualizing the material complexities of present-day societies. Contemporary archaeology challenges conventional anthropological and archaeological conceptions of the past by pushing temporal boundaries closer to, if not into, the present. The volume is organized around three themes that highlight the multifaceted character of urban transitions in present-day cities - creativity, ruination, and political action. The case studies offer comparative perspectives on transformative global urban processes in local contexts through research conducted in the struggling, post-industrial cities of Detroit, Belfast, Indianapolis, Berlin, Liverpool, Belem, and post-Apartheid Cape Town, as well as the thriving urban centres of Melbourne, New York City, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. Together, the volume contributions demonstrate how the contemporary city is an urban palimpsest comprised by archaeological assemblages - of the built environment, the surface, and buried sub-surface - that are traces of the various pasts entangled with one another in the present. This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that the study of contemporary cities pose for archaeologists.

This book surveys an archaeology “in and of the present.” It investigates the challenges and pitfalls of an archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the methodologies for doing it. It consists of a collection of chapters in which authors from within and outside of archaeology reflect on cross-disciplinary concerns. Contributors discuss topics ranging from scale and time to ruins, memory, authenticity, sectarianism, heritage, modernism, and disaster. To extend and complicate the interdisciplinary overviews and archaeological thematics, the book presents in-depth case studies on mobilities, space and place; media and mutabilities; and things and connectivities. Three contributors?representing disciplinary interests in archaeology, geography and photography?produce photo essays in which they reflect on some of the central themes in an archaeology of the contemporary world. The book pursues questions of materiality that appear to owe much to Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project (2002), a distinctively spatial exploration of the ruins and debris of the arcades of Paris. It also looks at spectacular events as sites of material intensity, including protests and riots, sporting mega-events, and festivals.

Commercial ranches are part of Hawai'i's colonial landscape and form an expansive archaeological horizon in rural parts of the islands. Ranching facilitated the evolution of folk societies of cowboys (paniolo) who incorporated Hawaiian language and values in daily working activities despite the multiethnic origins and nontraditional occupations of the workers. The archaeology of these communities in upland pastures of the Humu'ula district on the eastern slopes of Hawai'i Island is presented herein. The study provides an enhanced understanding of the evolution of colonial identities through multiple scales of analysis, including social, economic, and environmental responses of the rise of industrial capitalism, trends in vernacular architecture, engendered analyses of living floors, and microhistories embedded in individual artifacts.

This article discusses the housing used by residents of a small mining community called Rabbithole Springs in Nevada, USA, during the era of the Depression (1929 through the early 1940s). The interiors of the homes provide insights into how people lived during this trying economic period—and about how they lived on marginal land on the edges of society. In a study that considers the organization and elaboration of interior space, the “lifespace” of the residents is examined through the archaeological study of standing structures and subsurface remains of four buildings.